Microsoft cut AI transcription pricing by 72 per cent, and the rate expires in December
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Microsoft cut AI transcription pricing by 72 per cent, and the rate expires in December")
Microsoft cut AI transcription pricing by 72 per cent, and the rate expires in December Photograph: (Wikimedia Commons)
Microsoft AI has released MAI-Transcribe-2, claiming it is the fastest, most accurate and cheapest speech recognition model available, at $0.10 per hour of audio. That is roughly 72 per cent below what its own predecessor launched at — but the company has confirmed the rate is introductory and only holds through the end of 2026.
Microsoft AI has released MAI-Transcribe-2 with an unusually blunt claim attached: that it is the fastest, most accurate and cheapest speech recognition model in the world.
The price is $0.10 per hour of audio — around $1.67 per thousand minutes — and it undercuts the transcription services offered by OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs.
The Number Behind The Number
The more revealing comparison is internal.
MAI-Transcribe-1 launched at $0.36 per hour, itself considered competitive at the time. The new model arrives at roughly 72 per cent below that, from the same company, within a single product generation.
That is not a response to a competitor undercutting Microsoft. It is Microsoft undercutting itself, which is what a company does when it has decided the category should not be a profit centre at all.
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The Expiry Date
One detail deserves more prominence than it is getting: $0.10 is an introductory price that runs only through the end of 2026.
Microsoft has not said what the model will cost afterwards. Anyone building a product on that rate is building on a number with a known expiry and no announced successor — and transcription is exactly the kind of dependency that is easy to adopt and awkward to migrate off once it is embedded in a workflow.
This is a familiar shape. Price low enough to move the market, let the integrations accumulate, then set the real rate once switching has become someone else's engineering problem.
That is not an accusation of bad faith. It is the standard playbook, and it is worth naming while the discount is still in effect rather than after.
Where It Runs
The model is available now through Microsoft Foundry and the MAI Playground, with OpenRouter availability described as coming soon.
Reports of the team size behind it — one account puts it at around ten people — and of speed gains of roughly ten times over OpenAI's comparable offering come from coverage of the launch rather than from independently verified benchmarks, and should be treated as claims rather than settled numbers until third parties have run their own tests.
Why Microsoft Would Do This
Transcription is not a business Microsoft needs to win on margin. It is a feature that makes other things work: meeting summaries in Teams, accessibility across Office, call handling in customer service, and the voice layer of any agent that has to listen before it acts.
Priced near zero, it becomes a reason to stay inside Microsoft's stack rather than a line item customers evaluate on its own. Priced at $0.36, it was a purchase decision. At $0.10, it is closer to an assumption.
The competitive effect lands hardest on companies for which speech recognition is the entire business rather than a supporting feature. ElevenLabs and similar specialists cannot subsidise transcription from an operating system and a cloud contract.
What To Watch
What the post-introductory price turns out to be, and how much notice customers get. Whether independent benchmarks support the accuracy claim once researchers outside Microsoft can test it. And whether OpenAI and Google respond with cuts of their own — which would confirm that speech recognition has finished its transition from product to utility.
For buyers, the practical advice is narrow: the rate is real, it is good, and it is dated. Plan for what happens in January.
